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There is a story on the World Wide Web called ‘Getting Together’ by Richard A DeCristofaro. Basically it is a love story about two young Americans called Kennet and Lorraine, following them from the time when they first meet in 1986 to their engagement in 1993. I mention it not because it is of outstanding literary merit, but because it serves as a good introduction to some of the basic principles and methods of hyperfiction. In a preface, DeCristofaro describes its narrative structure as follows:
You will read parts of the story told by different characters, but most Ken and Raine… There are a number of ways you can move through the story. Using the ‘Switch point of view’ link will change you from Lorraine's story to Ken's, or vice versa. You can also move forward or backward in the current character's story (i.e. without switching viewpoints). There are also several options presented at the bottom of each screen. Clicking these will move you to the page that describes what is on the link. Not all of these options are available on every page.
The links at the bottom of a randomly-selected page read:
Forward in same point of view
Backward in same point of view
What Ken thought of that summer
What Raine did that summer
What happened the next time Bethany saw them
Back to the introduction
Obviously ‘Getting Together’ is written using multiple viewpoints, but this is nothing new in itself. What really marks it as a full-blown hyperfiction is the fact that there is no single path mapped out for us to follow. In a linear narrative using multiple viewpoints, the viewpoints would be presented to us one at a time, in a fixed sequence. The order in which we moved from one viewpoint to another would be determined in advance by the author, and his or her decisions would be enshrined by the order in which the book-pages were printed. Of course there is nothing to stop us reading the pages of any book out of sequence, but to do so is an act of conscious sophistication, a deliberate flouting of convention and (we assume) it goes against the author's intentions. In ‘Getting Together’, on the other hand, the choice...